


Mashka's Boy

by justanothersong



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 1950s, Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Human, Archaeology, Communism, Communist Slurs, Detective Dean Winchester, Ethnocentrism, Eventual Fluff, Eventual Smut, Explicit Language, Historical, Historical Fantasy, Homophobic Language, Imperial Russia, M/M, Military, Minor Character Death, Mystery, Private Investigators, Professor Castiel, Russian Revolution, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-02
Updated: 2014-04-02
Packaged: 2018-01-17 23:33:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1406683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justanothersong/pseuds/justanothersong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Private Detective Dean Winchester expected a laugh and a story to tell his friends when the quiet bespectacled man with an angel's name walked into his office late one night. What he didn't expect was to find himself chasing down a mystery halfway across the world with that same man at his side, or the way his amused fondness would grow into something deeper. With their lives on the line, Dean finds himself worrying over a lot more than his paycheck.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Please note; this contains graphic descriptions of Nazism and concentration camps, and probably more on similar themes in the future.

Dean Winchester was a soldier. 

It wasn’t something he had wanted or aspired to be, really. It had just happened, the way it had happened to so many others. The world had been falling to pieces and when the fight came to his backyard, Dean was in line to put things right, like everyone else. These days, thinking back on what a stupid naïve kid he had been, he would grin ruefully and shake his head. Barely eighteen and old enough to enlist, he had gone in expecting everything to be so black and white, perfectly cut and dry. There were bad guys and good guys, Allies and Axis, and good would win out in the end.

What he saw there… Christ, there hadn’t even been words. Still weren’t. And that was just on the battlefields. Dean had stuck with it, he had survived, and he had been among those who found the camps, who went in to tell the people they had been saved, and it was the only time in his life that Dean found himself overcome with tears and the need to vomit all at once.

Dean had never been the kind of man to blame citizens at large for a war. He hadn’t been too wild on the idea of going overseas for the sole purpose of killing, but his country asked him to; he hadn’t been among those raring for a fight, heading over to volunteer in England in the months prior. Of course, he hadn’t really known then, all of what was happening. Still, he knew that the average citizen probably didn’t understand, didn’t know what their leadership was doing to the people it was plucking out of towns and cities and sending away. Not everyone wanted it, he had thought. Not everyone had agreed with it. But when Dean saw… when he walked past the barbed wire, saw the crematoriums, saw the men he thought dead until they took a shuddering breath and tried to move, crunched gravel underfoot that came from pits now full of corpses, ran his fingers through piles and piles of wedding rings hoarded by the merciless greedy killers… something in him broke. Something changed.

He had spearheaded efforts to gather up the local citizenry, to march them past the gates. Past trenches full of emaciated and twisted corpses, past men and women wearing little more than striped rags, staring out with hollowed haunted eyes. Made them look. Made them see what they let happen right down the road from their happy homes and Sunday dinners. Of course, they claimed not to know. Maybe on some level, they didn’t. Maybe they fooled themselves into believing that it wasn’t real. But Dean knew, saw the horror, and now they deserved it… to see what they had allowed.

Dean had drawn the line at children, though many of the men in his unit had brought some along with their parents. He had barked out orders that the children be kept away; they would learn of it in time, in history books and news programs, but they didn’t need to see it. He wasn’t that cruel.

Until a little boy, a beautiful little boy with lively hazel eyes that reminded him so much of his little brother back home, had pulled away from the soldier Dean had ordered to stand and shield the children from the horror, looked directly at Dean and shouted, “Es ist zeit für Reich! Deutschland nur für Deutsche! Deutschland nur für Deutsche!”

Dean had felt as though he were watching himself from an outside vantage, watching himself grab the boy, little more than nine or ten years old, and carry him through the gates. Watching as he held the boy in front of a mass grave, shouting, “This? This is what you want?”. Watching as the child started shrieking and crying, watching himself carry the boy over towards a pile of dead SS guards and throw him at their feet. 

“Here’s you’re empire,” Dean had spat out and walked away. He didn’t even notice his second in command, Benny, scooping up the boy and delivering him back to his sobbing mother, or Aaron leading him to sit in the back of a truck with a cup of bad coffee.

Didn’t even notice himself shaking. 

All of that blood, all of that death, it had marked him, changed him, and Dean Winchester didn’t notice, not until he got home.

 

It was only four months after settling back into life in Kansas that his wife left him. Phyllis was a sweetheart; they had met only weeks before he was shipping out, and Lisa – that was what she preferred to be called, and Dean had liked it, thought it cute – had been taken with his uniform and his eyes and the romance of loving a man who might die tomorrow. He couldn’t blame her for leaving, when he spent his days at his uncle’s mechanics shop and his nights drinking, listening to the radio in silence while she sat across from him with wide brown eyes full of worry and fear.

He wasn’t that handsome officer with the dancing eyes full of laughter, not anymore. He had battle scars, on his body and in his mind, and there was nothing she could do to help him.


	2. Chapter 2

That had been nine years ago; Dean wasn’t a young man anymore, and he was beginning to feel it. He drank too much, smoked too much, and took on work that was worse for his health than the booze and the cigarettes combined. His uncle had eventually gotten tired of his showing up to the shop late and hung-over, and told him quite plainly to “shape up, or ship out”. Dean had chosen the former.

So maybe he wasn’t a soldier anymore, but he was still in the business of fighting and keeping people safe. He liked to tell people it was a little more noble than it really was, that he was the finder of lost things: money, jewelry… sometimes women, sometimes witnesses… sometimes a little lost dog. Hell, private detectives couldn’t often afford to be choosy, and Dean was one of the least picky operating in Chicago these days.

Still, he didn’t quite get this guy’s angle. The man seated across from him looked a little too prim and proper to be on this side of town, particularly at this time of night. Yet here he was, sitting in the rickety chair across from Dean’s even more rickety desk, in his stuffy tweed suit, clean-shaven, dark hair perfectly parted and combed back, round wire-frame spectacles perched upon his nose like he was born with them. It was a little surreal.

“Say again?” Dean said, arching an eyebrow at the stranger.  
“I need to hire someone for the purpose of protection,” the bespectacled man repeated. 

Dean snorted. “A bodyguard?” he said. “For you?”

The man across the desk pressed his lips into a firm line and Dean could see his cheek twitch ever so slightly, as though he were biting down hard to stop himself from snapping angrily in response. 

“For me, yes,” the man said after a long moment. “You came recommended to me by a mutual acquaintance, Mr. Winchester, and I’d rather you take this seriously, or I will be forced to turn elsewhere for assistance.”

Dean snorted again. Four-Eyes sounded as though he had swallowed a dictionary. “Yeah, yeah, sorry, buddy, but you just don’t look the type.” He paused and leaned back in his chair, swiveling from side to side on creaky castors as he gave the stranger another appraising glance. “What kinda mess you get yourself into? Skimming some cash from the boss? A little backseat bingo with somebody else’s girl?”

There was the muscle-twitch again; Dean tried his damnedest not to laugh, though a smirk crept across his lips at the reaction.

“I assure you, Mr. Winchester, I have done nothing wrong,” the man responded, glaring through his wire frames. “I have noticed as of late that there seems to be someone following me, all hours of the day, and items have gone missing from my home and workplace. This morning I received a strange letter in the mail that has me concerned that things will continue to escalate.”

“Lemme take a look at it,” Dean told him, and a moment later, the man produced a folded piece of paper with the name ‘Castiel Francis’ scrawled across it in messy handwriting. Taking the offered letter, Dean opened it; his eyebrows shot up towards his hairline when he saw odd blocky writing that seemed almost vaguely familiar, though he couldn’t place the style. “The hell is this?” he asked.

The man, Castiel, apparently, sighed. “It is written in Cyrillic script,” he explained, and when Dean only stared, waiting for further explanation, he added, “It’s Russian.”

Dean dropped the letter as quick as though it were on fire. “You some kinda pinko?”

Castiel scoffed. “Hardly,” he responded dryly. “I’m Roman Catholic.”

Warily, Dean picked up the letter once more. “So what’s it say, then? And why’re you getting Commie love letters in the first place?”

With a sigh and a roll of his eyes, Castiel shook his head. “That would be my reason for coming to you, Mr. Winchester,” he said in an exasperated tone.

“Why don’t you just spell it out straight for me, Mr. Francis?” Dean replied, cold but polite. “Who sent you my way? What kind of protection do you want, exactly?”  
Castiel sighed again, picking at a loose thread on the knee of his slacks. “I believe you have worked with my brother, Gabriel Francis? He recommended you when I approached him with this issue.”

Dean’s green eyes went wide as saucers. “You gotta be kidding me!” he said. “That lousy two-bit loan shark is your brother? Well, I’ll be damned.”

“Not many see the familial link, I can assure you,” Castiel replied with a snort and a small smirk, and for a second there Dean was tempted to smile in response. “We are brothers only in the sense that we grew up in the same household, under the care of the same orphanage matron. Even so, we do have a good deal of affection towards one another, in spite of our… rather different paths in life. Regardless, I trust his word in saying that you are ‘the best’.”

Dean stared skeptically for a long moment. It seemed strange that anyone would have it in for the seemingly mild-mannered librarian-type of guy; but a paycheck was a paycheck, and if Gabriel had sent him along…

With a grunt, Dean nodded. “So where do we start?”


End file.
